A Meditation on Violence Against Women and Nature

Laura K Kerr, laurakkerr.com

He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.

— Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

Inspiration: A Colloquium

Earlier this month, I had the honor and pleasure of being part of a colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Titled, “Violence in/and the Great Lakes: the thought of VY Mudimbe and beyond,” this colloquium was hosted by the Thinking Africa project of the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes.

VY Mudimbe was born in Belgian Congo, and is the Newman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University. He is the author of many books and articles of philosophy and cultural critique, as well as novels and poetry, and is an esteemed scholar of African thought, culture, and history. Professor Mudimbe is also a person of great compassion yet realism. As both our guide and inspiration, he brought not only wisdom and experience to the colloquium, but also a commitment to safeguarding the humanity and dignity of life. With Professor Mudimbe as a mediating presence, our collective meditation on violence in the Great Lakes region was both sensitive and critical, which is not easy to do when the topic is violence.

My initial plan for this post was to give a summary of the colloquium. Yet I am still thinking about what was shared, still reflecting on the different perspectives and approaches to the topic of violence. I was also moved by discussions with students and faculty at Rhodes about violence, poverty, and exploitation in South Africa. Thus, to give a summary would feel dishonest, putting artificial limits on something that is not yet done for me, as well as somehow doing violence to a shared experience and others’ voices. This is both the beauty and curse when philosophy is enlisted in the service of problematizing the seeming nature of things: such reflective awareness has a way of suspending action. And yet it is often an impulsive and thoughtless drive that leads to violence.

Instead, I will share some ideas that have resurfaced for me and taken on new forms as a result of my participation in the colloquium. These ideas are rough sketches about relationships between men, women, and nature explored through the lenses of mythology, ecopsychology, and early civilizations. I am hoping to understand violence in ways that might lead to healing the wounds of the Congolese and other peoples exposed to the destructive underbelly of modernity. And I am still searching.

Blood and Treasure: Why one of the world's richest countries is also one of its poorest.

by Adam Hochschild
Mother Jones

IN 1890, A BEARDED YOUNG POLISH SEAMAN made a trip up the Congo River as a steamboat officer and was appalled by the lust for riches he saw among his fellow Europeans. A decade later he finally got the experience onto paper. "A stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass-wire" flowed into the interior, wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, "and in return came a precious trickle of ivory...The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it."

The trickle of ivory that Conrad described was highly visible: elephant tusks carried on the shoulders of exhausted porters from the African interior to the coast, where it could be shipped off to Europe to be carved into jewelry, piano keys, and false teeth. More than 100 years later, far more wealth flows out of this same territory, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, but today much of it can't be seen. If, for example, you stand beside the washboard dirt road that winds out of the Ituri district of the country's northeast, you will see a few vehicles, not more than five or 10 an hour: a dusty SUV, an army jeep, two men on a motorbike, an ancient truck with a precariously high load of fruits and vegetables and a layer of people hitching a ride on top. But you won't see the treasure they are carrying, for it is too small. It will be in little plastic bags in someone's pocket, or perhaps, better to be concealed from thieves and greedy policemen, sewn into a shirt seam or slipped under a shoe's insole. In this part of the country the main source of wealth is gold. More than $1 billion worth is mined in Congo each year, and a good portion of it comes down this road.

Gold is only one of a half-dozen or more lucrative minerals to be found in Congo, and together they constitute what may be the worst case on Earth of what has come to be known as the "resource curse." As inevitably as oil drew the United States into Iraq, it is the temptations of this wealth—more than ethnic rivalries, the legacy of colonialism, or anything else—that has turned Congo into the horrific battleground it has been in recent years. A country with a lavish array of natural riches and a dysfunctional government is like a child heiress without a guardian: Everyone schemes for a piece of what she's got.